unask
poems and photographs 86
(photographs: Tom Davis)
Friday, January 29, 2010
A break now, for a week; the next post will be on Sunday, February 7.
|
Thursday, January 28, 2010
in love
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit, and the Muse -
Nothing refuse.
Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet...
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
From R.W. Emerson, Give all to love
|
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Dante's Paradise
O splendour of what is, by which I saw
the high delight, the true communion:
please show me how to say all I could see.
Up there there is a light. The light is God.
Creation contemplates its own creator,
and only in that seeing is there peace.
It stretches in a circle shape
so great, that its circumference
can so much more than wrap around the sun.
From top to bottom, that enormous light
collected, complex, is each single one
of all the gathered petals of a rose;
and all of it, each quality, the size, the height,
so big, so intricate, and yet one flower,
I saw: the whole, at once. The joy.
from Dante, Paradiso, canto xxx, transl. Tom Davis
O isplendor di Dio, per cu’ io vidi
l’alto trïunfo del regno verace,
dammi virtù a dir com’ ïo il vidi!
Lume è là sù che visibile face
lo creatore a quella creatura
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.
E’ si distende in circular figura,
in tanto che la sua circunferenza
sarebbe al sol troppo larga cintura.
...
E se l’infimo grado in sé raccoglie
sì grande lume, quanta è la larghezza
di questa rosa ne l’estreme foglie!
La vista mia ne l’ampio e ne l’altezza
non si smarriva, ma tutto prendeva
il quanto e ’l quale di quella allegrezza.
|
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
erasure
I write, erase, rewrite,
erase again, and then
a poppy blooms.
Hokushi; his death poem (d. 1718).
The poem is built round a pun: the word 'erase' and the word 'poppy' are the same word, 'keshi', in Japanese. So the last line also means:
a flower is rubbed out
which is, of course, a pun in English.
|
Monday, January 25, 2010
white flower
He said, I am with you always.
That means, when you look for God
That God is the looking itself,
Yes, and the thought of looking
And the you that thinks the thought
Always, already, all of it;
There is no outside.
A white flower grows in the silence
Let your speech be that flower.
Rumi, transl. Tom Davis
|
Sunday, January 25, 2010
dawn
there is no dawn that was
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.
Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.
Archibald MacLeish, An eternity
|
earlier ~ site map ~ strange shadows
|